The Russian grannies win Twitter’s Eurovision

Scott Thompson uses Starcom MediaVest Group’s ECHOscreen tracking tool to look at the mentions of the Eurovision competition on Twitter…

With over 2.3 million tweets around the event – peaking at over 25,000 tweets a second – it certainly gave us plenty to look at.

To put this number into context, it is more than double the million tweets around the Manchester derby earlier this month, and this year’s BRIT awards generated around 1.3 million tweets.

Even the big ‘event’ TV shows like Britain’s Got Talent, The Voice and The Apprentice do well to generate more than a few hundred thousand tweets over the course of a show. (And although there was certainly a broader international audience than UK TV shows, the English language still dominated the tweets.)

As the broadcast started, an excited fanbase was already sending 5,000 tweets per minute, but by the time the UK’s Engelbert Humperdinck had finished the first performance of the night, this had more than doubled to 11,554 tweets/min.

(Sadly for #TheHump, his performance was yet to generate its peak on Twitter. When the UK dropped into the last place on the table during the scoring, Twitter hit 12,983 tweets in a minute.)

And as Albania’s Rona Lishliu’s singing reached what I suppose you would call a crescendo, Twitter did the same – reacting to the performance which terrified some of the audience.

While its fun to watch different countries’ ideas of ‘music’, for me it’s the connection between whats happening on television with what is happening in the digital space that fascinates me.

It was the during the sixth performance of the night as the Buranovskiye Babushki (AKA ‘Russian Grannies’) sang Party for Everybody that Twitter hit its peak for the evening at 25,057 tweets in a single minute (475 tweets in a second.)

But although the Russian performance was clearly going to be a favourite following the earlier rounds, it appears that the online reaction may have been enough to draw an additional one million TV viewers (compared to 10 minutes before their performance.) Not as large a spike in audience as later on when the England match finished, but still what appears to be an impressive impact from online media.

Many of those who switched over will have been just in time to see Jedward’s performance for Ireland. Although it might have been a disappointment for the voters, it certainly generated a reaction on Twitter with the second highest peak of 23,828 tweets/minute. And while Sweden’s Euphoria went on to win the competition, it only generated the 6th highest peak on Twitter with 17,817 tweets/minute.

The speed of response is something brands should take note of – people are not just watching, but reacting to events in real time.

See the full article and infographic here.